Playhouse musical explores Chaplin’s life and times

For better or worse, Charlie Chaplin spent almost his entire life in the limelight. Eventually, “Limelight” became the name of one of the movie icon’s final films — a bittersweet story about a washed-up vaudevillian.

Now it’s the title of a stage musical, just beginning a world-premiere run at La Jolla Playhouse. But the new piece, say its creators, turns out to be as much about lifelines as it is about the limelight.

“A lot of the show has this theme of rescue to it,” says Christopher Curtis, the composer, lyricist and co-writer behind “Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin.”

His partner on the show’s book, Thomas Meehan, speaks of how that theme shines through such Chaplin films as “City Lights,” in which the actor-director’s indelible “Little Tramp” character tries to help a blind girl see again.

“We realized that was really about (Chaplin’s) mother,” who was in and out of insane asylums from the time Charlie was a boy, Meehan says. “He wanted to find a way to save his mother — to get her sane.”

That yearning to rescue — and, ultimately, to be rescued — intertwines with the agonizing loss of his mom to become the through line of the musical. The piece sweeps across the decades from Chaplin’s blighted childhood at the end of the 19th century, through his matchless movie career and on to the struggles and triumphs of later life.

“I sort of knew the story of Chaplin vaguely,” says Meehan, a multiple Tony-winner for “Hairspray,” “The Producers” and “Annie,” who also co-wrote the book to the Playhouse-launched Broadway show “Cry-baby” in 2007.

“But when you really get to know it, it’s a remarkable life. He had a really impoverished childhood in the slums of South London, with a father who was a drunk (and a singer-actor). He was very close to his mother, who was a musical performer as well. She was in mental hospitals all the way up to (her death).”

Chaplin and his brother were sent to live at a workhouse. After joining a performing troupe and making his way to America on tour, the young Charlie caught the eye of Mack Sennett at the fledgling Keystone Studios, which hired him to work on films.

“He arrived in Hollywood in 1913, totally unknown, with no money,” as Meehan says. “And in seven years, he was about the most famous man in the world.”

Chaplin would go on to make some of the most groundbreaking and memorable movies of all time, from the silent-era classic “Modern Times” to the deeply satirical “The Great Dictator,” which lampooned Adolf Hitler. Along the way, he helped found the powerhouse United Artists studio.

He also had a notoriously chaotic personal life, with four wives (three of whom were teenagers when he married them) and several mistresses; Chaplin fathered 11 children, the last when he was 73.

But as rich as that history is, Curtis — an up-and-coming composer based in New York — is quick to note that “we’re not doing a biography” of Chaplin.

“We highlight moments of his life that connect to the story and the theme that we’re telling. There is tons of stuff you can tell, but you can’t put in everything.”

Meehan adds that “it’s more impressionistic.”

Taking on the show’s title role is Robert McClure, a Broadway-seasoned actor best-known for a long stint in the hit musical “Avenue Q.” McClure admits that at the outset he didn’t have a deep knowledge of Chaplin’s career beyond an image of “this really funny guy who fell down a lot.”

His first dive into the film clips left McClure amazed — not just at Chaplin’s expressive genius, but also at how he managed those daring film feats without getting “really, really hurt.”

“These are not special effects,” as McClure notes. “He’s really falling down an escalator. The man gets into a cage with a lion. He had no fear at all. And then I come to find he never got hurt. He broke a finger once. So I became more and more in awe of him.”

To McClure, Chaplin’s fearlessness played out “in terms of his career as well. The show explores that — how he continued to be groundbreaking. This was a silent movie star who was still around way beyond silent movies, because he kept himself relevant.”

Curtis began toying with the idea of a piece about Chaplin about 10 years ago, when he wrote the first material. But it wasn’t until a workshop production at a New York musical-theater festival in 2006 that “Limelight” really began to come together.

That’s when Meehan came to see the work, on the suggestion of Andrea McArdle — the original Broadway “Annie” who was playing the “Limelight” role of the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

“I thought it was a really interesting and beautiful score,” says Meehan. “Very melodic. I hadn’t heard that kind of really lovely Broadway music in years.”

The show also has extensive choreography by Broadway veteran Warren Carlyle, who was given a co-director credit when the show’s original director, Michael Unger, departed the production after rehearsals began.

Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley said the show was a collaborative effort between Unger and Carlyle, “but as rehearsals progressed, it became clear that Warren was the one to see it through to completion.” (In an e-mail, Unger said he was “rather sideswiped” by the change and was “still reeling from it,” but declined commenting in detail.)

Curtis describes the show’s score as rooted in the sounds of Chaplin’s time, including the silent-movie era. But those sounds might not be what comes to most people’s minds.

“When people think of Charlie Chaplin, they think of a Keystone, rinky-dink piano thing,” Curtis says. “That really wasn’t his sound. It was the violin. He played the violin, and composed his own music on it. So his sound was very orchestral. A lot of it’s very romantic, very ‘up.’ ”

One song, “Look at Other People,” has Chaplin’s mom teaching him to do pantomime by looking at people in the street and “trying to find the story in their faces,” Curtis says.

Another, “Just Another Day in Hollywood,” takes comic license with Chaplin’s romantic life, surrounding him with females.

“But again, all those young girls, he was always saying to them, ‘Don’t lose your innocence,’ Curtis says. He argues that there is an element of rescue even in Chaplin’s relationships with underage girls.

Chaplin’s own moment of salvation, Meehan and Curtis believe, came when he married Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona O’Neill, with whom he would spend the rest of his life (he died in 1977 at age 88).

She was with him through the agony of being exiled from the United States after he was wrongly branded a communist sympathizer in the red-baiting 1950s; and through his triumphant return to receive an honorary Oscar in 1972. (Charlie and Oona’s granddaughter, Aurelia Thierree, was by happenstance at the Playhouse earlier his year with her solo show “Aurelia’s Oratorio.”)

To Curtis, O’Neill took away at least some of the pain that Chaplin had held in his heart since that long-ago parting with his mother.